The narrator of Ayşegül Savaş’ second novel, White on White, is an art history graduate student studying “Gothic nude sculptures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” She heads to an unnamed city to conduct her research, staying in a home owned by an art scholar. The upstairs studio is intermittently occupied by the scholar’s estranged wife, Agnes.
The setup alone ought to provide a sense of some of the themes Savaş is concerned with: the relationship of our personalities and relationships to art; how crisis and history inform creativity; the distinctions between those who make art and those who study it. Savaş’ prose is unobtrusive in a way that lets these ideas surface without announcing them; it’s a brisk book that moves patiently. In that sense, the novel echoes the art it discusses. Agnes’ paintings, we’re told, are about “attaining stillness” and a “blank mental state.” The first work of hers we learn about is “entirely white” with a head at its center, but the narrator finds it “too faint to grasp its full form, as if I were seeing it behind a rapidly shifting mist.”
So it is with the novel. Savaş, impressively, has at once deposited her readers in the literary equivalent of a clean room — the prose is unaffected, straightforward, easily graceful — and dumped us into a fog. We understand practically from the start that Agnes’ arrival will be disruptive, the novel’s source of conflict, even if we’re unclear exactly how. As the narrator’s acquaintance with Agnes expands to a month, two months, a year, she becomes more aware of Agnes’ many dramas (involving her husband, their children, and an au pair) but tries to keep them at arm’s length. The narrator’s instinct toward self-protectiveness is logical. But, we’re asked to wonder, does that instinct run counter to an artistic, sensual sensibility?
In terms of its mood and general themes — not to mention the lyricism of its writing — White on White often reads like a close cousin of Andre Aciman’s 2007 novel, Call Me By Your Name. The two share a European setting (or at least one concerned with European art), an interest in the push and pull of creativity and scholarship, the combination of emotional and intellectual awakenings. But where Aciman’s hero, Elio, sees sunlight amid the tension, Savaş’ narrator follows a darker path. Where Aciman foregrounded eroticism, Savaş emphasizes sangfroid. Aciman’s novel depicts art as revelatory, but Savaş tends to see clouds and murk. Scholarship and intellect open doors in Aciman; here, the narrator often feels either hemmed in by her research, or frustratingly disordered. She is coming of age — her namelessness underscores her lack of an identity — but into an adulthood that feels constrained and frustrating.
This happens patiently, engrossingly, because Savas is careful not to make Agnes a harridan or a cynic. She’s encouraging toward the narrator, at least at first: “I hope that you learn to trust your own tastes, in whatever work you do.” She’s a model of an accomplished adult — a real-deal artist as opposed to a parasitic scholar. The narrator recalls, “I studied the way she talked, the wine she bought for the apartment, how she drank her tea, trying to commit her tastes to memory.”
But what the narrator neglects is that an artist is parasitic, too. In time, the narrator is asked to serve as a sounding board, then a proxy daughter, then an ally in Agnes’ rift with her husband. When Agnes gripes about a former au pair, Jana, it has nothing to do with how Jana handled the children but with how she handled her artistic ambitions. Jana’s mistake, by Agnes’ lights, was to not fully bring Agnes into her discipline. “She was annoyed with the girl for painting so much, considered it dishonest, maybe because Jana had gotten the idea from her, or because she’d never asked Agnes for help. ‘You’d think,’ Agnes said, ‘that she was in competition with me.’”
Agnes’ emotional manipulation, it slowly emerges, is as skillful and subtle as whatever she does on a canvas. She can be generous and complimentary to the narrator, then just as quickly sound a note of foreboding: “‘You should know,’ she said, ‘that there comes a time when your body begins to give way. And you should also know that this happens very early on … I mean the sudden loss of weightlessness which you get accustomed to in your youth.’” The warnings become sharper in time, spikier: “It’s difficult to tell whether you are exceedingly polite or willfully blind,” she tells the narrator, once the predicament becomes all but inescapable.
Much of the power of White on White comes from Savas’ excellent command of the slowly darkening mood, the way she titrates details about Agnes’ demanding, sometimes cruel character and the narrator’s naivete, about how each reveals something about the other. The ending is delivered as a kind of shock, but it is clear how every detail in the novel was calibrated to lead up to it.
And it’s clear, too, how perilously close the narrator is to becoming someone as capable of resentment as Agnes is. White on White doesn’t really pit creativity against scholarship, though that’s what it seems to be at first. Rather, Savaş wants to explore the line between the emotional engagement that’s necessary to make good art (or scholarship) and the emotional distance that allows you to keep making it. Agnes, in her passive-aggressive way, is informing the narrator of all the things that keep you unsteadily bouncing from one side to the other — children, a misunderstanding spouse, an au pair that’s “in competition” with you. Weight.
The narrator is “polite” enough to understand this from a watchful distance, yet “blind” enough to miss being roped in by it. And the same is true for us — after all, every good novel succeeds because it makes the reader feel complicit in its imaginary dramas. Agnes works in white, while Savas works in mirrors.
[Published by Riverhead on November 30, 2021, 192 pages, $26.00 hardcover]